Coin Hoarding Merchants and Crypto Assets: Analyzing the Binary Relationship Between Listed Companies and Blockchain Projects

Introduction

The election of Trump as President of the United States in 2024 has a significant impact on the global encryption industry, with his crypto-friendly policies becoming one of the core governing philosophies. This is followed by a series of favorable policies such as Bitcoin national reserves, stablecoin legislation, and Circle becoming the first stock of stablecoins. The crypto assets industry is gradually moving towards compliance, embracing regulation.

At the same time, many listed companies have begun to follow the Strategy model to become BTC Coin Hoarding merchants. There are tens of thousands of listed companies worldwide, many of which have seen their market value severely shrink and liquidity drastically lacking. By becoming Coin Hoarding merchants, these companies can gain new financing channels to supplement liquidity. Even some companies unrelated to crypto assets or finance have joined the ranks of Coin Hoarding merchants, such as the American luxury car modifier ECD, which raised $500 million through equity financing to become one of the Bitcoin Coin Hoarding merchants.

However, recently, listed companies have an increasingly wide range of options for Coin Hoarding, with many tokens in the top 100 Crypto Assets being listed as alternatives. In fact, many project tokens are not suitable for long-term holding. Moreover, many tokens are relatively centralized, with the founding team having significant decision-making power, making it difficult for Coin Hoarders to play a larger role. This article will explore in detail the binary relationship between Coin Hoarders and Crypto Assets, as well as thoughts on the proposition of decentralization.

1. A Public Company Perspective on Crypto Assets

Undoubtedly, the primary purpose for publicly listed companies to choose financing to purchase Crypto Assets is market value management. According to statistics, there are currently 34 publicly listed companies holding BTC. At the same time, the management of several companies is proactively transforming their businesses into Coin Hoarding businesses for ETH, SOL, HYPE, etc. by 2025, in order to emulate the successful path of Strategy. This strategy has indeed brought significant growth to the stock prices of publicly listed companies.

Sharplink Company previously focused on sports betting and announced in May 2025 that it had completed approximately $425 million in private financing, planning to heavily purchase ETH as its main treasury reserve asset. The company’s stock price rose from $2.97 to $124 within 10 days, an increase of over 40 times. The blockchain early project investment company Cypherpunk Holdings was renamed SOL Strategies in September 2024, indicating that the company is a Solana version of Strategy. The company’s stock price rose from $0.08 to $4.24 within 3 months, an increase of over 50 times.

A large number of listed companies view transforming into Coin Hoarding businesses as a panacea for boosting stock prices, with purchased Crypto Assets expanding from BTC to SOL, HYPE, BNB, and others. In reality, many companies buying coins are simply following trends, with management lacking a full understanding of Crypto Assets and inadequate long-term strategic planning for purchasing coins. This chapter will take the perspective of listed companies and select suitable Crypto Assets for purchase based on their different needs.

1.1 Covering financing costs PoS public chain tokens > PoW public chain tokens

The public's initial awareness of listed companies hoarding coins stems from Strategy Company's one-time purchase of over 20,000 BTC in 2020. CEO Michael Saylor claimed that they would only buy BTC in the future and never sell it. Coinciding with the BTC bull market of 2020-2021, Strategy Company's visibility continued to rise, and purchasing crypto assets allowed listed companies to turn their fortunes around, becoming a classic case in the capital market.

Bitcoin is the representative public chain of PoW( proof of work), and its mechanism relies on computing power from CPU, GPU, ASIC, etc., continuously performing hash collisions in mining pools, ultimately completing block generation to earn BTC rewards. Before Strategy buys BTC, Bitcoin mining companies such as Marathon, Riot, Cleanspark, etc., primarily engage in mining BTC with their mining machines, and they already have some unsold crypto assets on their balance sheets.

For listed companies, the issues with PoW public chain assets like BTC are similar to those of gold; after purchase, they can only serve as strategic reserves and are difficult to generate "money from money" through other means. PoS public chains give more weight to the tokens themselves, and transactions on PoS public chains require node block production approval, which necessitates staking a certain amount of governance tokens to become a node. The staking amount for Ethereum network nodes is fixed at 32 ETH, while there is no staking amount limit for Solana network nodes. Governance token holders can share a certain proportion of transaction Gas fees as rewards ( different public chain revenue sharing mechanisms are different ).

For publicly listed companies that rely on debt financing, holding PoS public chain governance tokens and staking them can yield annual returns of 2% to 7%. This portion of the income may cover the company's debt financing costs. Even if the company's performance declines, companies holding PoS public chain tokens do not need to worry about interest repayment issues.

How listed companies choose PoS blockchain crypto assets 1.2

Compared to the "Buy and Hold" strategy for BTC, the selection and purchase of PoS blockchain governance tokens by listed companies is a more complex system engineering task. Some listed companies may prefer to buy crypto assets with higher price volatility; some may lean towards purchasing crypto assets with a higher degree of decentralization; and there are also some companies that are unable to build their own nodes, thus needing to purchase crypto assets that have mature liquid staking platforms. The table below summarizes various token characteristics from multiple dimensions, serving as a comprehensive reference for listed companies planning to purchase crypto assets.

The staking yield can be compared to the stock dividend yield. Based on the demand of listed companies, the demand for becoming a PoS token Coin Hoarding merchant mainly falls into three categories: ( obtaining high staking yields, covering financing costs while having positive cash inflows. ) obtaining high asset appreciation, driving stock price growth. ( occupying a core position in the ecosystem, strategically laying out around the public chain ecosystem. The following text will filter suitable targets based on the different goals of listed companies.

)# 1.2.1 Pursue high staking returns: SOL staking yield is high, public chain trading volume is stable

For publicly listed companies with high costs of issuing additional stocks or bonds, high-yield staking cryptocurrencies are highly attractive. According to data, the 7-day annualized return rates of public chains such as Polkadot, Cosmos, and Celestia exceed 10%. However, these crypto assets have weak price preservation capabilities due to their high inflation rates. The aforementioned three types of assets have decreased by 42%, 36%, and 71% respectively over the past year. Staking yields cannot cover the decline in coin prices, making it not the optimal choice for publicly listed companies.

In contrast, SOL has maintained a rising trend in token price over the past two years while having a high staking yield. The maximum drawdown in coin price over the past two years was 52%, indicating strong stability. In the Solana staking yield model, node staking yield = ( Blockchain rewards + MEV income + Tips income ) / total staking amount.

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The formula shows that the numerator and denominator have the highest proportion of blockchain rewards in the numerator, while the amount of blockchain rewards is related to the transaction volume of the public chain. The transaction volume of the Solana public chain has maintained rapid growth over the past 5 years, with a monthly transaction volume of 2.97 billion in June. On the denominator side, the current staking rate of SOL has reached over 65%, so there will not be a situation where a large amount of SOL joining the staking nodes leads to a decrease in yield. Overall, the staking rewards of 7% for Solana network nodes are relatively stable.

From the perspective of a listed company, the relatively difficult step in the business model of becoming a SOL Coin Hoarding merchant through targeted placement or bond financing and obtaining positive cash flow through node staking is building a node. Solana network nodes require high-performance servers as hardware support, with a minimum configuration of a 64-core processor, 256G memory, and 1T hard drive. In addition, becoming a network node also requires high-speed network bandwidth support. On the software side, becoming a Solana node requires downloading Git, Rust, and Docker, and configuring the node requires a certain level of coding knowledge.

It can be seen that if a listed company builds its own Solana network node, it requires a high technical threshold. If the company determines that the process of building its own node is too complex, it can choose between two options: a liquid staking platform or RPC node services.

Jito is currently one of the main liquidity staking platforms on the Solana network, and its staking operation is relatively simple; just connect your wallet and enter the amount to earn an annualized return of 7.19% as of July 3, 2025. However, using the staking platform may reduce the returns to some extent, as the platform does not display the direct deduction ratio. Specialized staking platforms can obtain higher Tips and MEV floating returns through staking, while stakers receive a fixed annualized return.

For companies that hope to obtain excess returns through Tips and MEV, but want to lower the threshold for node construction and fixed capital investment, they can choose the RPC node services of node service providers such as Helius. Users lease the bare metal servers from the service providers, which ensure a minimum latency of )<50ms( and high throughput, meeting the high-performance requirements of Solana validators. In contrast to platforms like Jito, where users' returns are fixed and platform profits fluctuate; service providers like Helius charge users a fixed fee ) with different package fees (, while floating revenues such as MEV and Tips completely belong to the users.

In summary, each of the three options has its advantages and disadvantages. Staking platforms are suitable for low-investment lightweight Coin Hoarding merchants, RPC node outsourcing services are suitable for medium-sized Coin Hoarding merchants with a certain level of investment, while building your own nodes is suitable for Coin Hoarding merchants with relatively strong capital and certain technical building capabilities. Additionally, being a SOL Coin Hoarding merchant also carries certain risks, as the Solana network is relatively centralized and has previously experienced multiple mainnet downtime events, which can have a certain impact on token prices.

)# 1.2.2 Pursuit of Value Growth: HYPE transaction fee buyback mechanism, coin price has achieved 10 times growth

For listed companies facing liquidity shortages, the primary demand in the short term remains to enhance stock market value, maintaining normal operations of the company through methods such as reducing stock holdings. As coin hoarders, listed companies commonly adopt the strategy of buying high-growth or highly valued assets to rapidly increase stock prices. HYPE is the mainstream crypto asset for market value growth in the first half of 2025. If listed companies become HYPE coin hoarders, their stock prices will be linked to the HYPE token price, potentially enabling rapid growth of the company’s market value in the short term.

Compared to public chains like SUI, TRON, and XRP, which have also seen significant market value growth in the past year, HYPE's advantage lies in its refined token supply and demand management, ensuring the scarcity of HYPE tokens. Over the past six months, Hyperliquid's assistance fund has repurchased HYPE worth a cumulative $910 million by reinvesting about 97% of the Gas fee revenue into HYPE buybacks. Currently, only 34% of the total supply is in circulation, and 23.8% of the tokens held by the team will be locked until 2027-2028, while nearly 39% of the tokens are designated for community rewards and will be distributed gradually. Since the project has not accepted venture capital funding, there is no external selling pressure, which enhances the long-term value potential of HYPE.

The operating nodes of Hyperliquid are more centralized compared to Solana, with only 21 nodes existing in the entire network, which maintains a high-efficiency operation of the public chain to some extent. Therefore, even if a listed company purchases a large amount of HYPE, it is still difficult to become one of the 21 core nodes. The official staking platform of the public chain, StakedHYPE, will become an option for Coin Hoarding merchants to earn additional income through staking. This platform has attracted over 10 million HYPE for staking. Compared to other public chains, the staking yield of HYPE is relatively low, with data showing a yield of only 2.28%.

(# 1.2.3 Pursuing Ecological Layout: ETH has a high degree of decentralization, and the development difficulty of Layer2 is low.

In the field of Crypto Assets, redundancy of public chains is an obvious phenomenon. According to statistics, the total number of public chains on the entire network has exceeded 200. In fact, most developers choose to develop products on major public chains such as Ethereum, Solana, and Sui, while the trading volume of numerous independent public chains has been declining year by year.

From the perspective of listed companies, some companies are no longer satisfied with merely being Coin Hoarding merchants; instead, they hope to develop DeFi or GameFi projects on the public blockchain through Coin Hoarding, building a second curve for business growth. Ethereum Layer2 modular Blockchain has become the preferred choice for these companies due to its low development difficulty and high flexibility.

Rollups as a Service )RaaS### is a major trend in blockchain infrastructure for 2024-2025. RaaS platforms ( such as Caldera, Conduit, and Zeeve ) provide one-stop solutions, including SDKs, templates, testnet faucets, and block explorers, enabling companies to deploy Layer2 networks in minutes, while traditional self-built Rollups may require.